I can imagine using a model that contains elements that are merely convenient pretenses, and don’t actually exist—like using simpler Newtonian models of gravity despite knowing GR is true (or at least more likely to be true than Newton.)
If some of these models featured things that I care about, it wouldn’t matter, as long as I didn’t think actual reality featured these things. For example, if an easy hack for predicting the movement of a simple robot was to imagine it being sentient (because I can easily calculate what humanlike minds wold do using mys own neural circutry,) I still wouldn’t care if it was crushed, because the sentient being described by the model doesn’t actually exist—the robot merely uses similar pathfinding.
Does that answer your question, TimS’-model-of-shiminux?
I can imagine using a model that contains elements that are merely convenient pretenses, and don’t actually exist—like using simpler Newtonian models of gravity despite knowing GR is true (or at least more likely to be true than Newton.)
If some of these models featured things that I care about, it wouldn’t matter, as long as I didn’t think actual reality featured these things. For example, if an easy hack for predicting the movement of a simple robot was to imagine it being sentient (because I can easily calculate what humanlike minds wold do using mys own neural circutry,) I still wouldn’t care if it was crushed, because the sentient being described by the model doesn’t actually exist—the robot merely uses similar pathfinding.
Does that answer your question, TimS’-model-of-shiminux?